I've been doing IF (the "one meal per day" form) for a while now, mostly because I find it helps me focus during the day.
When I used to eat breakfast, I'd be productive in the morning, until I started getting distracted by craving lunch. Then I'd eat lunch, and end up sleepy and groggy afterwards while I digested.
Now that I'm used to IF, I feel more productive; I spend less time at work thinking about food, and I miss that whole post-lunch carb crash thing.
Obviously it's just anecdotal, possibly all psychosomatic, etc., etc. But I like it.
I'm with you. Breakfast has always felt very skippable for me. My body doesn't seem to crave it in any way. I'd grown up listening to the conventional wisdom: eat a hearty breakfast, or else you'll be so hungry you'll snack all morning and afternoon. But I never really found that to be the case. Really, I experienced the opposite effect, as you've described. Whenever I eat breakfast, I find myself hungry again anywhere from 30 to 60 mins later. When I don't eat breakfast, my hunger sort of quiets down and doesn't reemerge until later.
I basically never eat breakfast and see no negative effect, but when I tell people this they immediately get concerned about my wellbeing. The "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" idea is deeply ingrained in our culture.
I listened to the advice of family and friends for the early part of my life and ate breakfast as others do, but it always made me feel a bit bloated, and then shortly after, actually hungry where I wouldn't have been otherwise.
Left to my own devices I do not eat in the morning, I just drink perhaps a coffee, but mostly water and green tea. I'll start getting hungry a few hours after waking up, which is ideal because that is right around lunch time.
Then I'll eat after work, or after my thrice-weekly lifting session, with perhaps a small snack later on. Usually something like cheese, cucumber and chutney on wholegrain crackers.
My stomach just does not seem 'awake' in the mornings and never has done. When I did eat in the morning it always felt like a bit of a chore.
I'm read somewhere once that hunter-gatherer humans never really ate in the morning either, and our bodies go through some process/reaction after waking from sleep that gives us a burst of energy, enough to go out and forage or hunt, and that eating first thing in the morning is a recent thing in our evolution.
Makes perfect sense to me given my own personal experience.
I typically do better having breakfast, a hearty breakfast allows me to have a light lunch without heavy cravings. I've tried skipping breakfast with mixed results. I've also tried moving my eating period to breakfast & lunch with skipping dinner with some positive results, although it can be tough when I'm with others eating or drinking after work.
I do agree though, that the concept of breakfast being important is bunk. Everyone is different and as these IF studies show, no one meal is all that important.
But it makes me think too, other cultures have a strong emphasis on breakfast, and that doesn't necessarily include cereals (but it would include bread). Like France, Germany, and Finland.
I'm in Ireland, where people are definitely under the Kellogg's influence.
It's not so conspiranoic; the agri-lobby managed to get cereals and grains (+pasta) in the base of the food pyramid, where it should be at the top, since they're essentialy refined carbs.
Granted, in the 50s we didn't have the same scientific knowledge as we do today, but the food pyramid was "invented" by them for their own benefit, make no mistake. Remember when butter was good for you because it lubricated your arteries?[1] Or when doctors were associated with smoking?[2]
This sort of propaganda easily permeates into popular culture and can cause a lot of harm. Refined carbs are 90% guilty of the worldwide obesity pandemic.
""[I]n many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started," Lenna F. Cooper, B.S., writes in a 1917 issue of Good Health, the self-proclaimed "oldest health magazine in the world" edited by none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the co-inventor of flaked cereal. "It should not be eaten hurriedly, and all the family, so far as possible, should partake of it together. And above all, it should be made up of easily digested foods, and balanced in such a way that the various food elements are present in the right proportions. It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories," Cooper's article continues.
Granted, Kellogg did hold an M.D. degree, but there's no denying he had a product to sell."
"It should not be a heavy meal, consisting of over five to seven hundred calories" is still good advice. That's about how big my breakfast is. Yes, I weigh it and count the calories.
How did you find your sleep patterns on days you missed breakfast? And what about your general stress levels?
I heard a sleep doctor give a lecture awhile ago who repeated the advice of eating a hearty breakfast, primarily as a way to encourage good sleep. She said that our bodies interpret food within 30 mins of waking up as a signal that food is abundant, which lowers our general stress levels and makes it easier to sleep.
Skipping breakfast, on the other hand, signals food scarcity or higher predator threat, increases stress hormones, and encourages lighter sleep so you can be woken more easily.
No idea how true it actually is, but it seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Couldn't you make the same argument about a hearty meal within distance of sleeping? I typically eat at the end of my day and ALWAYS conk out 2-3 hours after my last meal.
Eat carbs before sleep, they block orexin receptors and make you sleepy.
The "stress hormones" at the beginning of the day are beneficiary - they make you more attentive, easier to focus and, last but not least, make caffeine (and other stimulants) more stronger (you need less caffeine for same effect). So, enjoy fasted wakefullness at the beginning of the day, and gluttony sleepness at the end of it.
It's weird how that works. Like you I never feel the urge to have breakfast. Like, never. Sometimes I'll eat it if its available because I'm a lean guy and it has always been hard for me to put on and retain mass. However more often than not I don't have breakfast on the weekends. And if I'm really engrossed in something, there have definitely been times when I skip lunch too.
I haven't really experimented or tested the impact of this yet, but I wonder how it ties in alertness/energy levels. I'm normally a zombie in the morning and don't get productive till the afternoon and evening.
I have the same tendency, when I eat breakfast I get ravenously hungry within an hour unless it's a massive breakfast. Even with a large breakfast, I'll be just as hungry by lunchtime as I would be without the breakfast, sometimes even more.
Tangentially, "post-lunch carb crash" means you have insulin resistance and should be restricting carbohydrates, either low-carb or ketogenic. You'll know you set the dial properly when you no longer droop after a meal. That is, blood insulin and glucose curves are mild.
It's actually a sign of insulin over-secretion rather than poor insulin sensitivity.
However, in practice, there are signs as to whether you have good insulin sensitivity or not and possibly whether you over-secrete insulin. Here’s two very simple questions to ask yourself regarding your response to diet.
1. On high-carbohydrate intakes, do you find yourself getting pumped and full or sloppy and bloated? If the former, you have good insulin sensitivity; if the latter, you don’t.
2. When you eat a large carbohydrate meal, do you find that you have steady and stable energy levels or do you get an energy crash/sleep and get hungry about an hour later? If the former, you probably have normal/low levels of insulin secretion; if the latter, you probably tend to over-secrete insulin which is causing blood glucose to crash which is making you sleepy and hungry.
I don't understand why Lyle still doesn't mention the roles of insulin/leptin/dopamine receptors (and strategies to boost their results) in newer studies.
This is exactly what I do and I find that I have more energy throughout the day even though I also work out more than I did before starting IF. However, people don't typically believe me that eating less is making me feel better and have more energy. Although for me it's not just about fasting, it's also about making sure my one big meal of the day is all about nutrients as opposed to calories.
I tend to do a little bit of both; everything in good measure. In my opinion, the combination of IF and something akin to Keto approach to food composition(low carb, high fat, low-medium protein) is only improving my recovery and performance. If the idea is that our body actually uses fat as it should, as an active source of energy instead of a battery that keeps sitting around, things should work at the very least equally as well if not better. This is a very personal experience, of course.
> When I used to eat breakfast, I'd be productive in the morning, until I started getting distracted by craving lunch. Then I'd eat lunch, and end up sleepy and groggy afterwards while I digested.
Me as well. To help tamper the hunger craving, I drink a 1/2 portion of that popular "soy meal replacement" for breakfast, then again at lunch. I found I can maintain the hyper focused state all day, without a post-lunch crash. Not an expert, but I feel a little something for my stomach to process keeps my metabolism marching along.
I had been doing the same thing for most of my adult life just out of programmer habit. I have previously moved to three squares a day, and noticed exactly the same things you describe here. Now the one thing that is true is that it is almost totally incompatible with a heavy exercise schedule. It is very hard to go too long without eating when you go to the gym and run everyday.
I've been doing "IF" since I was a young teen, to be perfectly honest. I've never ever enjoyed breakfast, for the reasons you've cited, so put me down as another anecdote that backs it up.
At least one study did find that many subjects exhibit better insulin response in the morning, implying that such people should shunt their carb consumption to earlier in the day rather than later.
EDIT: then again, here's useful background as to why this occurs:
When I used to eat breakfast, I'd be productive in the morning, until I started getting distracted by craving lunch. Then I'd eat lunch, and end up sleepy and groggy afterwards while I digested.
Now that I'm used to IF, I feel more productive; I spend less time at work thinking about food, and I miss that whole post-lunch carb crash thing.
Obviously it's just anecdotal, possibly all psychosomatic, etc., etc. But I like it.